Monthly Archives: May 2014

Our Iranian friend booked us a night train from Tehran to our next stop in the South of Iran : Shiraz.

The Tehran train station is well organized and as foreigners we had to show our passports to the station’s police where we were greeted with the big smile by the policemen. The train itself was good, clean, comfortable and on schedule even if it was quite slow : departure at 20h and we arrived at 11h30 a few kilometers up from Shiraz.

Travelling by train is always a great experience. As we woke up early in the morning, this is what was waiting for us behind the curtains :

Compared to Tehran, the streets are more typical and fitting what you’d expect from a desert city. That’s the exact kind of town you want to get lost in, just walking around and going into its nice and large bazaar.

Shiraz is known for its many palaces and beautiful gardens.

This city is also the usual starting point to visit the famous Persepolis. While the place is great, I must admit that we loved the abandonned park right next to it which is used as a playground and food camping by the schools and other Iranian tourists.

ebuild changes

"/var/log/syslog" log file is now deprecated
Beginning with rsyslog-7.6, the "/var/log/syslog" log file will no
longer being written per default. We are considering this file as
deprecated/obsolet for the typical user/system.
The content from this log file is still availble through other
(dedicated) log files, see
- /var/log/cron.log
- /var/log/daemon.log
- /var/log/mail.log
- /var/log/messages
If you really need the old "/var/log/syslog" log file, all you have to
do is uncommenting the corresponding configuration directive in
"/etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf".
If you do so, don't forget to re-enable log rotation in
"/etc/logrotate.d/rsyslog", too.

rsyslog-7.6.3

With 7.6 being the successor of the 7.5 development branch, everything that has been added there has now found its way into the stable version.
The major additions consist of :
- imrelp/omrelp now support TLS & (zip) compression
- impstats is now emitting resource usage counters, can directly emit delta values and can now be bound to a ruleset
- mmpstrucdata is a new module to parse RFC5424 structured data into JSON message properties
- mmutf8fix is a new module to fix invalid UTF-8 sequences
- mmsequence is a new module that helps with action load balancing
- new defaults for main/ruleset queues to be more enterprise-like
Also the new stable version has undergone a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and optimizations that make rsyslog 7.6 a lot more reliable and performing than before.

For our latest vacations, we spent two weeks in Iran and I must say that this country is astonishingly beautiful ! So forget what you think to know about this country as it’s either biased or doesn’t apply to its people who are very friendly and welcoming.

We started with two days in Tehran, a gigantic and lovely city where an Iranian friend we met on the internet invited us to a treck in the surroundings montains.

The first thing to have to get acquainted with is how to cross the streets. Seriously the traffic is madness and uncontrolled (no traffic lights) so you have to watch out everywhere. Then you discover their nice and cooled subway which is clean and shiny and so cheap you try and count four times as you’re sure you’ve heard the man wrong : 10 000 rials a ticket, yeah that’s like 0,2€…

Treck startpoint was Darban and then up to close to 3000m, thanks again Shayan. When we were awed by the beautiful mountains they had at the doorstep or their city, our Iranian friends told us that these mountains are also the cause of the massive pollution of Tehran in sping and summer because it blocks the winds from clearing the air…

Sunset from the Jamshidieh park, the tall tower on the background is the Milad Tower.

This is a great pleasure to announce the version bump of mongoDB to the brand new v2.6 stable branch !

This bump is not trivial and comes with a lot of changes, please read carefully as you will have to modify your mongodb configuration files !

ebuild changes

As a long time request and to be more in line with upstream’s recommendations (and systemd support) I moved the configuration of the mongoDB daemons to /etc so make sure to adapt to the new YAML format.

the mongodb configuration moved from /etc/conf.d/mongodb to the new YAML formatted /etc/mongodb.conf

the mongos configuration moved from /etc/conf.d/mongos to the new YAML formatted /etc/mongos.conf

the MMS agent configuration file has moved to /etc/mms-agent.conf

The init scripts also have been taken care of :

new and modern mongodb, mongos and mms-agent init scripts

their /etc/conf.d/ configuration files are only used to modify the init script’s behavior

highlights

The changelog is long and the goal of this post is not to give you an already well covered topic on the release notes but here are my favorite features :

MongoDB preserves the order of the document fields following write operations.

A new write protocol integrates write operations with write concerns. The protocol also provides improved support for bulk operations.

MongoDB can now use index intersection to fulfill queries supported by more than one index.

Index Filters to limit which indexes can become the winning plan for a query.

Background index build allowed on secondaries.

New cleanupOrphaned command to remove orphaned documents from a shard.

usePowerOf2Sizes is now the default allocation strategy for all new collections.

Removed upward limit of 20 000 connections for the maxIncomingConnections for mongod and mongos.

New cursor.maxTimeMS() and corresponding maxTimeMS option for commands to specify a time limit.

Make sure you follow the official upgrade plan to upgrade from a previous version, this release is not a simple drop-in replacement.

thanks

Special thanks go to Johan Bergström for his continuous efforts and responsiveness as well as Mike Limansky and Jason A. Donenfeld.

Two weeks vacations always seem short yet the 900+ mails waiting for sorting on my Gentoo Linux inbox was a reminder that our beloved distribution is well alive ! So I guess it was time for a little bug killing spree 🙂